Jackie Hooper, a recipient of a Courage To Come Back Award, mental health category, in her apartment, Vancouver, March 27 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ PNG staff

Undated Jackie Hooper stands in front of the gas station she worked at as a gas jockey to support herself while she earned a university degree after the Second World War. Hooper is the recipient of the 2014 Courage To Come Back Award in the mental health category.Submitted photo
/ PNG

Jackie Hooper, a recipient of a Courage To Come Back Award, in a group photo ( top row, second from the left ) when she serviced in the Canadian Army, Vancouver, March 27 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ PNG staff

Undated Jackie Hooper (fourth from the left) poses with other members of the Canadian Women Army Corps. During the Second World War. Hooper is the recipient of the 2014 Courage To Come Back Award in the mental health category.Submitted photo
/ PNG

Jackie Hooper, a recipient of a Courage To Come Back Award, l holds a photo of her deceased grandson as she looks through one of her photo albums, Vancouver, March 27 2014.Gerry Kahrmann
/ PNG staff

This is the first of six profiles on recipients of the 2014 Courage To Come Back Awards, presented by Coast Mental Health to six outstanding people who have overcome great obstacles only to give back to their communities. Their inspiring comebacks will be celebrated at a gala dinner at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre on May 8.

Jackie Hooper in her nearly nine decades on Earth has raised two children, served in the Second World War, flown airplanes, earned two degrees and a masters, written a book, painted hundreds of paintings, worked as a gas jockey and a librarian and tried to commit suicide many times.

One of her most fondly remembered of all those experiences is of time spent at a psychiatric hospital, in a ward called UBC One West.

“UBC One West was heaven,” said Hooper, 87, a grandmother of three and great-grandmother of two.

“If you’d been going through what I had been going through with my husband, and my friend (who betrayed her) and a delinquent son, you’d think it was heaven, too.”

And it was her various short-term stays in that ward in the 1970s that led Hooper to push for social housing for psychiatric patients living on their own in Vancouver, which helped earn her the Courage To Come Back Award in the mental health category.

“It’s my one thing I’ve done,” she said modestly in her tidy studio apartment near University Golf Course on Vancouver’s West Side, decorated with her pastel portraits and landscapes in the Group of Seven style.

Hooper’s admissions to UBC One West and later to St. Paul’s psych ward in 1981, 1996 and last year, were precipitated by her lifelong struggle with major depressive disorder, for which she continues to receive psychiatric help and to take medication.

She recalled feeling so safe and cared for in UBC One West, where she and other patients had their own rooms but shared a common area and professionals to help.

“The doctors were kind, the nurses were kind, it was wonderful,” she said, calling one nurse in particular an “angel.”

“When I got out, I said I was going to start up something like it,” she said.

She became involved in the 1970s with what was then called the Mental Patients Association, and she laid out her plan for an apartment building of about two dozen bachelor suites in which psychiatric patients could live.

“We needed a day room, a kitchen, a resident manager and a co-ordinator,” she said.

With the help of Coast Mental Health, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. and the provincial government, the first supported housing apartment building in Canada for people with mental illness opened in 1974 at Pendrell and Bute streets in Vancouver’s West End. The building had 25 bachelor suites and the parking lot was turned into a day room.

It was later named the Hooper Apartments in Jackie’s honour. Several other buildings followed and Coast Mental Health now lets out nearly 1,000 suites in dozens of buildings.

Nothing in Hooper’s past seemed to prepare her for this role as mental health and social housing advocate, but in a way everything did.

She has had a tough, fighting spirit from her youth and has taken on unlikely ventures throughout her life to provide for herself and her family.

Hooper was born in 1927, just before the Great Depression, and shortly after her parents separated, her father died of meningitis in the days before antibiotics.

Her mother was left to raise her and her older sister on a meagre widow’s pension, and dinner was often soup made from the bones they’d get free from the butcher, stewed with barley and vegetables.

She helped out with finances by taking her rowboat to troll False Creek for errant logs and selling them to a man she knew as Barnacle Bill on a boat called The Hell You Say, a perfect venture for a self-professed “tomboy.” She’d earn $3 a log, more than a day’s pay at her 25-cent-an-hour job at a delicatessen.

She’d also later work at Joe’s Tent and Awning, where she helped make the blackout curtains Vancouverites were required to hang in their windows during the Second World War for fear of a Japanese invasion off the Pacific.

At 17, she lied about her age to serve in the Canadian Woman’s Army Corps, and was posted to Halifax, where from 1944 to 1946 she picked up soldiers from the famed Pier 21 and drove them in a Willys Jeep to their homes across Nova Scotia.

After the war Hooper was able to attend UBC as a veteran, earning her first degree in economics, while she worked evenings pumping gas at Tommy Coleman’s garage at Pender and Hornby streets.

After she graduated, she got a job as a “photogrammetrist,” someone who created maps from aerial photographs. She recalled how she worked with only men and mapped out the bush that is now the Upper Levels highway on the North Shore.

In 1949, she also got her pilot’s licence and flew small planes.

She met Jack Hooper, who worked for the Vancouver News Herald, which published budding newsmen Jack Webster and Pierre Berton. Jack Hooper was 30 and married, but in 1953, after his divorce, they married, and had two boys.

The marriage lasted 19 years, but was always rocky because of Jack’s jealousy and tendency to regularly abandon her and the boys.

So Jackie earned a degree in library sciences at age 39 and worked as a librarian at Union Theological College at UBC.

It was then, dealing with a shaky marriage and a disloyal friend, and dealing with her younger son joining a gang, that she realized she needed help.

“I cracked up,” she said. Her darkest days included attempts to kill herself.

A dean at Christ Church Cathedral, which she had attended since 1942 and still does, put her in touch with a psychiatrist and she was eventually admitted to UBC One West.

Over the next several years, she managed to start up the social housing, while living in and out of UBC One West, and at age 59, she earned her masters degree in social work and worked as a social worker until she retired. She’s always lived on her own, in market housing, and, ironically, has never lived in the housing she helped create.

Her son Randy Hooper owns and runs Discovery Organics, an organic produce wholesaler.

Hooper played down her achievements, but the several letters supporting her nomination for the award are more realistic:

“Her resilience is remarkable,” wrote Garry Pennington, associate professor emeritus at UBC. “She has overcome an impoverished childhood, has had several physical health and mental health setbacks and has shown tremendous courage and fortitude.

“In more than 50 years (of professional work), I cannot name a person whom I admire more than Ms. Jackie Hooper,” he said.

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